


Priorities

by sanctuary_for_all



Series: A Thousand Ways [3]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Angsty Schmoop, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, First Kiss, Fluff, M/M, Rachel is Accidentally Helpful, Realization
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-04
Updated: 2015-09-09
Packaged: 2018-04-18 23:06:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4723652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanctuary_for_all/pseuds/sanctuary_for_all
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During an argument about Charlie, Rachel forces Danny to realize just how much Steve means to him.</p><p>***Post season 5***</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Danny tried not to hate Rachel, he really did. But, as their marriage had already made painfully clear, you didn't have to hate someone to have regular shouting matches with them.

"I need my name on Charlie's records, Rachel," Danny warned, phone pressed to his ear as he paced back and forth in his backyard. Grace was asleep inside, but they were still easing Charlie into more regular visits. "I'm not saying I want to kick Stan off, but I have as much right to get updated and make decisions about his treatment as the two of you."

"That's not necessary!" The sounds filtering in through the phone line made it clear Rachel had gone outside as well. "You would be consulted in—"

"I can't exactly trust that, now can I?" he snapped back. "You kept my kid from me for _four years_ , Rachel, and I still don't understand why the hell you even did it. How do you expect me to trust you now?"

There was silence on the other end of the phone, then Rachel let out a ragged breath. "I realized I hadn't really gotten you back," she said finally, voice quiet.

Danny stopped, thrown by the sudden change in conversation. "Wait, what?"

She cleared her throat. "That's why I didn't tell you," she said, voice stronger now. "I know it wasn't the right decision, but I was too heartbroken to do anything else."

New anger mixed with old hurt to send a sharp jab through Danny's stomach. "I missed the damn _plane_ , Rachel. It wasn't like you caught me in bed with someone else. I told you again and _again_ that I'd take the first flight out to Jersey as soon as I got the whole mess with Steve solved!"

For once in their collective lives together, Rachel didn't shout back. "And if Steve had called you again, after you'd moved back to New Jersey?" She sounded calm, on the surface, but there was something running underneath it that he couldn't quite read. "If he'd needed your help? Tell me you wouldn't have gone, Daniel."

Danny rubbed a hand over his mouth. Maybe, maybe he wouldn't have gone when Steve called – that would have just been about the cases, and he wouldn't have needed to actually be in Hawaii to talk those out with him. But the second he'd heard anything about the mess in North Korea, there was no pretending he wouldn't have been out there like a _shot_.  And when Steve's mother had wandered back into his life, just to mess with his head ... hell, he would have done anything Steve asked.

The silence was all the answer Rachel seemed to need. "The light was back in your eyes," she said finally, voice almost gentle now. "After all the misery that had happened between us,  you'd somehow transformed back into the man I'd fallen in love with. It was painfully, painfully easy to fall back in love with that man." The words trembled, just a little. "I would have followed you anywhere."

Danny's stomach twisted. There were a hell of a lot of moments where he wished he could rewind time and make a different decision, and it wasn't exactly a nice feeling to realize that getting back with his ex-wife and the mother of his children somehow wasn't one of them. "It wouldn't have worked, Rachel." His voice was rough.

"I know." She sounded so fucking _sad_ when she said that, and somehow the anger came back to comfort him. She had no _right_ to sound that sad about this. "Because I wasn't the one who put the light back in your eyes. No matter how much I wanted you to be, you weren't mine anymore."

He scrubbed a hand across his face, suddenly too exhausted to figure out what in the hell she meant. "You're the one who fucking threw me away, Rachel."

"Don't you think I know that?" The damn tremble was back. "I was wrong. I will forever admit that I was wrong. But that doesn't mean that I also won't forever hate Steve McGarrett just a little for being the one to make you happy again."

Something jerked hard in Danny's chest as he realized what she was saying. "So you're telling me you didn't tell me about my damn kid because you think I left you for Steve?" he asked incredulously, trying hard to ignore the pit that seemed to open up in the bottom of his stomach. "Seriously?"

"Other than Grace and possibly now Charlie, name me _one_ person on this planet who matters to you more than he does," Rachel shot back, her own anger returning. "One. I'll even accept dead people."

_Laying there, pinned under an immense slab of concrete and watching Steve do something that was either going to be MacGyver brilliant or fatally stupid. There are only two thoughts circling in his head – how much he was going to miss Grace, and that the only thing worse than this would be waiting outside while Steve died in here alone._

_Sitting in the back of that stupid cargo plane, trying very hard not to picture what might be happening to Steve in the terrorists' hands. He's the king of the worst-case scenario, watching everything dissolve into ruin long before it actually happens, but he can't do that now. With Steve, just like with Grace, Danny knows he wouldn't survive the worst-case scenario._

_Bursting in to find Steve on the floor, for just a second his chest looking as still as Wo Fat's. For just that second, Danny's world stops._

_Watching him dance with Catherine, another woman whose mission in life seems to be to break Steve McGarrett's heart. Danny wants to punch her sometimes, just like he'd do to Doris McGarrett if they ever cross paths again._

Rachel's voice sounded a million miles away.  "You can't think of anyone, can you?"

Danny hung up on her. Even as he did, he knew it was just as much of an answer as if he'd spoken.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As I was writing chapter 2, I realized I actually needed to switch perspectives partway through. So it turns out this is going to be three chapters - sorry. Also, a certain season 6 spoiler has been incorporated and fixed.

Danny was late.

Granted, it wasn't even quite a half hour past the usual time the man showed up at work, but generally if something made Danny late it annoyed him enough that he immediately jumped on the carphone and told Steve all about it in great detail. There had been no rant yet this morning – no call of any kind, for that matter – and when Steve tried his cell it went straight through to voicemail. Taken together, it left an itch under his skin Steve didn't like.

He headed over to Lou's office, trying hard to look more nonchalant than he felt. "You heard from Danny yet?" he asked, chasing memories of the South American prison out of his head. Danny was probably fine.

Lou didn't look up from his paperwork. "Called in sick."

That didn't sound right, and not just because Danny had apparently chosen to call Lou rather than him. "He sounded fine yesterday."

Now Lou looked up, giving Steve a penetrating look he'd seen from more than one commanding officer over the years. "Sounded fine today, too. Pissed as all hell, but fine."

Steve's brow lowered. That wasn't the response he'd been expecting. "Did he say why?"

"No, but he did tell me to tell you that he was contagious and that you specifically should not be allowed to go anywhere near his house." He sounded amused, but surprisingly sympathetic. "A piece of advice – if my wife said anything like that, that would be my cue to buy a dozen roses and start making reservations."

Steve winced, trying to remember what he might have done to piss Danny off that much. The last real argument they'd had was about his plan to propose to Catherine – he'd known Danny too long not to recognize all the nuances of his "Are you kidding me?" smile – but Steve knew that was because Danny didn't want him to get his heart broken again. He didn't think that would lead to this.

But if this was his fault, then staying away was definitely not an option. "I've got something I need to take care of," he told Lou, mind still searching for possibilities. "If Chin asks, tell him I'll be back as soon as it's done."

"Only if you tell 'something' he still owes me $20 from the Bears game." Lou's voice was wry. "And you should maybe think about the fact that you didn't protest me using my wife as an acceptable comparison to you and Danny."

Steve hurried out without responding.

000

He didn't bother going to Danny's house. If he was really that upset, there was only one place he would be.

When he saw the familiar figure sitting on the low stretch of wall overlooking the ocean, Steve realized that he'd hoped he'd been wrong. Danny only needed his favorite spot when things had gotten really bad.

He didn't even have time to step out of the truck before he heard Danny's voice. "Damn it, you can't even follow the simplest instruction, can you? Sometimes I am deeply confused as to how you ever survived basic training."

Steve ignored the jab, stomach twisting at how exhausted Danny sounded. At this point he knew every shade of Danny's voice, and he only got this particular tone when he was pretty sure he couldn't tread water anymore. "Talk to me, Danny." He sat down in his usual spot, barely resisting the urge to reach out to the other man. "Tell me what's wrong, and what I need to do to fix it."

"Shit." Danny made a sound that was too angry and heartbroken to be a laugh, dropping his head down to press the heels of his hands against his eyes. "Somehow I just knew you'd say that."

Hearing Danny in pain was always a knife to the gut. He hated that it had happened often enough for the feeling to be this familiar. "I mean it. Talk to me."

Danny took a deep breath, lifting his head to stare out at the ocean. "Well, Melissa called this morning and stated pretty clearly that she's done keeping secrets and can't be in a relationship with someone who isn't. So unless I tell her whatever it is I've been _avoiding_ telling her, we were pretty much done." This anger Danny was directing squarely at himself, a sensation Steve was all too familiar with. "As I didn't tell her even then, I'd say it's safe to say we're done."

Shit. He'd never been thrilled with Melissa, no matter what name she used, but he'd pretended because he wanted Danny to be happy. That happened a lot with the women Danny was involved with, and he thought he'd gotten pretty good at it by now. "You just felt backed into a corner. Maybe if you went over there—"

"No." He scrubbed a hand across his face. "I would have been happy putting off telling her for _years_. You, though, I didn't even go an hour without telling."  

"That's different." There were things Danny knew that he couldn't imagine telling Catherine.

Danny gave an awful not-laugh again. "Yeah, about that." He let all the air out of his lungs, and when he spoke again his voice was rougher and less steady than it had been. "Rachel and I were fighting last night. She said she didn't tell me about Charlie because by that point I'd left her for you."

Steve's brain jerked to a halt at the words. He wanted to tell himself it was just confusion causing the paralysis, but there was a voice in the back of his head screaming _no no no, he can't ever know_ that left him with the sick sensation that it was a hell of a lot more significant than that. "I didn't even know you when you got divorced," he managed finally, not even caring whether or not the words made sense.

"Not then." Danny shook his head, still not looking at Steve. "The second time, when she'd just gotten pregnant and I was going to run off to Jersey with her and the kids."

Steve had been caught in the edge of an explosion once, the world ripped out from under him an instant before he was slammed back into it. He'd broken several bones and punctured a lung, but what lingered longest in the memory was what it felt like to come that close to losing everything.

Staring at Danny now, Steve felt an ice-cold echo of that feeling.

His voice failed him, his entire body on lockdown as old defense mechanisms kicked in four years too late to do anything about it. Something about the silence made Danny turn, expression immediately turning concerned the minute he got a look at Steve's face. The old shields had never really worked that well against Danny anyway. "Damn it, Steven, what's wrong?" He swung one leg back over the wall, pressing a hand against Steve's forehead. "You look like shit. Did you drive up here to give me crap about my fake sick day when you should _actually_ be in bed?"

He cleared his throat, forcing the words out. "You didn't tell me."

"That I was up here? That's kind of—" Danny stopped himself abruptly as sudden understanding passed over his face. His expression gentled. "I couldn't. Even then, I knew you were the one person on the planet who could talk me out of it." He pulled his hand away, looking almost sad now. "Then the whole mess with Governor Jameson happened, and I ended up staying because of you anyway."

Guilt opened up a yawning pit inside him. It would have completely screwed up Steve's life if Danny had left back then, but what if Danny's life would have been infinitely better? Steve's life didn't matter as much as his. "I'm sorry."

Danny shook his head. "It was my call, not yours. And honestly, it was probably easier that I never left, because even if I had I would have just kept coming back." The self-recrimination was slowly but surely sneaking back into his voice.  "Either for North Korea, or to slap everyone around for not _telling_ me about North Korea. Then for the plane crash, your mom, Afghanistan...." He shook his head, looking away. "Hell, I left Gracie's _championships_ when Billy died because I was afraid you were having some kind of damn emotional crisis."

Everything inside of Steve went still, not sure what Danny was saying. He could feel something rising up inside him, clawing past the guilt, and Steve was terrified to think it might be hope. "I was always glad you were there." His voice was rough. "I couldn't have done it without you."

"You probably could have." The sadness was back now, a thousand times worse than the self-recrimination. "But that still means Rachel was right. I keep choosing you."

Steve lost is breath. "That's ... it's not like that." But the voice in the back of his head had gone quiet, terrified and almost giddy as it waited, and there was a pressure in his chest demanding that he _do_ something. His fingers itched, wanting nothing more than to _reach_. To _touch_.

"However it is, it doesn't matter." Danny sounded almost bitter now as he scrubbed his hands over his face. "I'm a moron, and you're about to get engaged."

Steve froze, not sure what Danny was talking about for a second. Then memory came back, bringing with it the horrified realization that _he'd forgotten about Catherine_.  He'd nearly convinced himself he was going to marry her, spend the rest of their lives together, and the second he gets a sliver of hope that Danny might want more than friendship he pushes her completely out of his thoughts.

It probably meant he was a terrible person, and put the last three years in an entirely different light. He'd thought Cath was leaving him, but from her perspective she'd never really had him to begin with.

His first priority was always going to be Danny.

The realization settled into his bones, steadying him. He still didn't quite dare let himself believe he knew what Danny was saying, but there was one thing he was now sure of. "I'm not getting engaged."


	3. Chapter 3

"I'm not getting engaged."

Danny had been so certain Steve was going to say something else – had braced himself for something like "me getting married won't change our friendship" or another "it's not like that," with a hell of a lot more understanding behind it this time – that it took him a second to process what had actually been said. "Really?" Relief unfurled in Danny's chest that he knew would only get him in trouble later. He was already in too deep with Steve as it was – pretending he could keep him all to himself would only make it worse. "You finally realize you were going way the hell too fast?"

Steve met his eyes. "No." There was an odd catch in his voice, too much emotion held back, and Danny realized he might have missed something horribly important.

"Damn it." He pushed back a swell of anger at Catherine, reaching out for him again. As much of a mistake as it was for Steve to propose, Cath should have at least had the damn decency to tell him she'd think about it. "You asked and she said no?"

Steve blinked at that, looking utterly confused now. "You really think I'd do that without telling you?"

The response both warmed Danny and threw him off a little – if it wasn't a rejection that had put the emotion in his voice, he wasn't sure where it had come from. "The only other explanation I can think of is that you decided marrying Catherine wasn't a good idea, full stop."  Which meant that, for once in his insanely dangerous life, Steve was actually putting some rudimentary thought into protecting himself. No, it wasn't from bullets, but even worrying about emotional protection was an amazing amount of progress. "Which I fully support, by the way. I'm just annoyed you developed some rudimentary self-preservation instinct and only now got around to telling me."

"I did it as soon as I could." Steve gave him an intense look, almost like he was trying to communicate something telepathically. "I made the decision less than a minute ago."

There was a moment before Danny understood, when his brain tried to put together what Steve meant by that. He had too much experience with Danny’s relationship disasters for this one to somehow scare him off of romance. So what had Danny said—

 _Oh_.

Danny swallowed, suddenly not able to get enough air in his lungs. "You just decided." He sounded like he'd swallowed a blender, his heart pounding loudly enough in his chest that he was pretty sure they could hear it from Jersey. "I tell you that I keep choosing you, and you suddenly decide not to get engaged to your girlfriend."

"Ex-girlfriend," Steve said quietly, expression suddenly fragile. "As soon as I talk to her again."

Staring at him, heart in his throat, Danny was hit with the sudden memory of watching that couple get married in their hospital room a few years before. He'd immediately gone home and broken up with Gabby, and at the time he hadn't let himself think about why.

Particularly because he could also remember looking at Steve's face during the ceremony, chest squeezing tight because he knew exactly what it was like to have one person you were determined to hold onto, no matter what. To be afraid, angry or in pain, but to know that none of it mattered as much as this other person. Even though he hadn't been able to admit the exact reasoning to himself back then, he'd known he couldn't keep Gabby away from a job she loved while he felt that way about someone else.

Specifically, about the man sitting across from him right now. A man who’d been determined to propose to his girlfriend through every sensible argument Danny had, then almost immediately decided to break up with her the moment Danny admitted he was a little too emotionally invested in him.

Steve … Steve was the kind of person you changed your life for. Even Catherine had tried giving up her whole life to stay with him, and though she hadn’t had the guts to stick it out the first round she was at least back for a second go.

Danny … wasn’t that kind of person. Steve would hate him for this eventually, just like Gabby would have if he hadn’t given her the all clear. 

“You don’t … I’ll be okay.” It felt like he was ripping the words straight out of his insides, and he couldn’t have made himself meet Steve’s eyes if there was a gun to his head. “You shouldn’t screw up your life just because mine’s a wreck.” The silence stretched out, heavy and horrible, and Danny waited for it to be broken when Steve got up and drove away.

Then Steve spoke. “You’re the reason I’m still in Hawaii.”

Danny’s head jerked up. “Bullshit.”

Steve just looked at him, his expression utterly serious. “Jameson had offered me 5-0 earlier that morning, and I’d already told her no. And yes, I took the job to get control of Dad’s case, but I’d planned on going back to the SEALS the second that was done. All the good memories I had of Hawaii had been buried by the bad ones.” Then, suddenly, the corners of his lips ghosted upward. “But then I figured out how to not make you hate me anymore, and once that happened I realized you were the best thing that had ever happened to me. I stopped thinking about going back to the SEALS, because if I was going to keep you I was going to have to stay in Hawaii.” His smile widened briefly. "Of course, keeping _you_ in Hawaii turned out to be a little harder."

Danny couldn't find the lie in it. That part made sense, actually – Steve had never lied to him, not unless you counted "Of course I try to keep myself safe" as a lie and that wasn't exactly fair. But the idea that it was true ... Danny's brain couldn't process it. After everything that had happened to him in the last five years, somehow _this_ was the thing that so utterly flipped the established world order that his brain got lost trying to find the new parameters.

His heart, however,  didn't give a shit about any of that. Taking control of the body while the brain was distracted by its nervous breakdown, it made Danny surge forward and catch Steve's mouth with his. If he'd been capable of thought he would have told himself it was a terrible idea – they'd both said a lot, but nothing that specifically greenlit this as something that would be welcome – but Steve's lips opened softly under his at the first touch and it felt like the eighth wonder of the world.

He pulled back then, only to check with Steve that he really had permission for that sort of thing, but then Steve chased his mouth for more and all questions were put on indefinite hiatus. There was only Steve, tasting of coffee and home, his freakishly huge hands braced on Danny's legs like he was scared to let them roam but didn't want Danny to get away. There was no chance of that – Danny's hands were braced against the sides of Steve's face, his entire body thrumming and alive in a way it hadn't been in a very long time.

When they finally broke apart, Steve looked at him with such awe that something hard and cold in Danny's chest started to crumble. Hope, rare and impossible, sparked and flared inside him. "You are _insane_ ," he whispered, voice thick.

Steve grinned, bright as the sun, then leaned back in for another kiss. "I love you, too."

**Author's Note:**

> Come check out my new original fiction on my [blog](http://jennifferwardell.blogspot.com) or say hi to me on [Tumblr](http://sanctuaryforalluniverses.tumblr.com)


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